Thoughts on Karma
The Law of Karma by Joseph Goldstein
“All of our actions have consequences”
· Understanding karma is the key to understanding happiness.
· Tibetan teachings express this succinctly: everything rests on the tip of motivation.
· We need tremendous courage, honesty, and willingness to look into our hearts.
The third reflection that turns our minds toward the Dharma is the understanding that everything we do has an effect—all of our actions have consequences. In the Buddha’s teaching this is called the law of karma, the understanding that we are the heirs of our own actions, It is referred to as “the light of the world,” because it illuminates how our lives unfold and why many things are the way they are. Understanding karma is the key to understanding happiness.
Put simply, actions bring results. We may not always have the wisdom to see or anticipate the results correctly, or we may only have a partial vision of them, but it is this common understanding that inspires us all to act. We anticipate some result from our actions, whether it is some worldly gain or greater wisdom and compassion.
The Buddha went one essential step further in clarifying this process of action and result. The possibility for our happiness, and indeed for our entire spiritual journey, rests on the clarification that what most completely determines the result of any action is the motivation behind it. Tibetan teachings express this succinctly: everything rests on the tip of motivation.
We can easily see how this works in the world. There is a difference, both in how we feel and in the effect on others, between actions motivated by greed or envy and those motivated by generosity or love—even when the outward action is the same. We may give someone a gift out of a genuine loving feeling, or because we want the person to like us, or because it looks good in the eyes of others. The consequences of each of these varied motivations will be very different, both in the moment and in the long run.
Given the great importance of motivation in determining the results of our actions, it becomes essential that we actually know what our motivations are. This is not easy. We need tremendous courage, honesty, and willingness to look into our hearts.
Staying unaware, we simply play out all the habits of our conditioning. Without knowing what our motivations are we have little chance of letting go of unskillful motivations or of developing genuine wisdom. One teaching says that if we had the choice, upon coming down to breakfast one morning, between finding either a very large sum of money or someone who could accurately point out all our faults, the latter would be of much greater value to us. Such is the benefit of self-knowledge. And yet how many of us would make that choice?
For a long time in my meditation practice I felt embarrassed and ashamed when I saw unwholesome states in my own mind, states like pride or jealousy, ill will or selfishness; and instead of examining them and working free of them, I would judge myself and dig the hole I was in even deeper. Or I would feel judged and unhappy when my teachers or other people pointed out these unwholesome mind states to me. But after years of practice I’ve come to feel grateful when 1 observe these unskillful patterns arise, because now I would rather see them than not see them. It becomes another chance to unhook from these patterns, to see their essential transparency, and to let go of the burden they bring.
Padmasambhava the great spiritual adept who brought Buddhism to Tibet, emphasized the importance of understanding karma and the power of our motivations when he said, “Though my view is as vast as the sky, my attention to the law of karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” Our vision of the Dharma may he vast, but we need to ground it in a wise attention to our actions,
From One Dharma, by Joseph Goldstein, HarperCollins Publisher Inc ISBN, 0-06-251701-5
THE CONSOLATION OF KARMA
Abstractly speaking, karma is not really a theory of fate; it's a causal theory. And it says that anything bad that happens to you is a resonance of something bad that you perpetrated in a previous life.
The main thing about karma, what we might want to call collective karma, is that when there's a disaster where people haven't done anything and a terrible thing happens from nature, the bodhisattva, or the outside person looking at the situation, never invokes the karma theory and says, "Well, I don't have to worry about them because that was their bad karma and they got wasted and too bad"--as if it were some sort of fate or a way of writing off the disaster. It should never be used that way.
The bodhisattva never accepts the absoluteness of that explanation, although she would be aware of it. She would think of it as a terrible tragedy, unprovoked and unmerited, and would try to do everything possible to save the people from the disaster and help the survivors.
On the other hand, the karma theory that everything bad that happens to me is from my own negative action in the past is always useful for the person who suffers. In other words, using the karma theory to blame the victims is good for the victims to do to themselves. This is a very surprising idea. If the victims just sit and shake their fist at the universe, shout at God (if they are theists) or shout at karma, then they weaken themselves in the sense that they have just emphasized their helplessness.
Whereas if they say, I'm going to use this disaster that happened to me as if it were expiating previous things that I did to the world that were negative, and I'm going to grow stronger from it...In other words, I can't do anything about the disaster but I can do something about my reaction to it. I'm not going to add to the suffering it has caused with a new suffering of agonizing about myself and feeling helpless and feeling angry at the external world. I'm going to take responsibility for being in the way of the disaster as part of my own karma and therefore I'm going to use this tragedy as an advantage toward freedom, toward buddhahood.
Excerpted from an interview with Robert Thurman, from Buddhadharma, Spring 2005: